First of all, let me say that though I use Linux (Red Hat, at work) regularly, I am a complete beginner when it comes to actually administrating it.

What I am trying to accomplish:

I have (at home) a PC with Windows 7 installed

I would like to run a Unix in Virtual Box, because I am more used to developing / scripting on it

I settled on Freebsd at the moment, and I managed to install it and configure the network. The next step is sharing a folder from Windows to Freebsd so that I can easily edit files on Windows and on Freebsd both. Unfortunately it seems a though thing to do.

I installed the guest additions in freebsd using pkg_add -r virtualbox-ose-additions, the install proceeded switfly enough, and I edited /etc/rc.conf to add the two suggested lines: vboxguest_enable="YES" and vboxservice_enable="YES" and rebooted.

3 Answers
3

A FreeBSD ports committer has confirmed this on the FreeBSD mailing lists as of (2014-06-24):

Shared Folders for FreeBSD guests are not supported yet [...] There is some draft code and a kernel module for it but it's not working yet.

If you want to follow the state of the port, please search the mailing lists. There is also the #freebsd-vbox IRC channel on Freenode. It was posted to the freebsd-hackers mailing list at the bottom of this post. You will find developers there.

Finally, here is what the virtualbox-ose-additions port currently supports according to Chapter 22.2 of the FreeBSD Handbook as of today:

The VirtualBox™ guest additions provide support for:

Clipboard sharing.

Mouse pointer integration.

Host time synchronization.

Window scaling.

Seamless mode.

As you can see, no shared folders support yet for FreeBSD.

Chapter 4.3 of the VirtualBox manual states:

Shared Folders are supported with Windows (2000 or newer), Linux and Solaris guests.

Yet again no FreeBSD. Use SMB shares for now, following the instructions that others have mentioned.

Hi Pete. Thanks for your answer. Actually I changed arms and went with Ubuntu Server as I preferred a non-samba solution and FreeBSD does not support vboxfs yet.
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Matthieu M.Sep 5 '12 at 17:17

1

You don't need to install samba for the above solution it works from a default install of FreeBSD.
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PeteSep 5 '12 at 22:38

I would recommend giving freebsd another go if you have time as i've found its jail feature very useful for development purposes. At the moment i have 5 jails: www(apache22+php53), www(apache22+php54), MySQL, PostgreSQL, email-server. I have found this invaluable in terms of testing different versions of php and databases
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PeteSep 5 '12 at 22:46

Also as FreeBSD has many terminals by default alt+f1 -> alt+f8 meaning if you go with jails you can build them in parallel saving you time when you use the ports system. Heck you could even setup a jail just to build software. I use qjail.
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PeteSep 5 '12 at 23:09

In the Sharing properties there are two ways to create the share; Simple Sharing and Advanced Sharing. I was using Advanced Sharing, and for some reason I don't really care about at this point, that did not work; I re-added the share through Simple Sharing and then mount/smbclient finally worked.